Crafting behaviours and employees’ and their partners’ well-being: a weekly study

ABSTRACT

Organizations are increasingly aware of the relevance of employees’ well-being, due to its positive impact on both companies and society. Based on the Work-Home Resources (W-HR) model, this study aims to analyse the relationship between two resource-gaining behaviours – i.e., expansion-oriented job crafting (JC) and leisure crafting (LC) behaviours- and employees’ and their partners’ well-being. A quantitative longitudinal study using weekly online questionnaires (for four weeks) was conducted with 50 participants and their partners. Results of a multilevel sequential mediation model with random slopes provided empirical support for the three-path sequential mediation model (weekly expansion-oriented JC ➔ weekly LC ➔ employees’ weekly well-being ➔ partners’ weekly well-being) when contemporaneous effects were considered, but not when time-lagged effects were considered. Thus, this study shows that work and leisure domains can be integrated – i.e., positively related- rather than segmented – and that both types of crafting behaviours positively contribute to higher employee well-being in the weeks when more crafting behaviours occur. In addition, when employees’ well-being increases from one week to the next, the well-being of their partners also increases. Taken together, these results suggest that crafting is a resource that contributes not only to the employees’ well-being, but also to that of their partners.

KEYWORDS:

• Job crafting
• leisure crafting
• well-being
• spillover

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Available Upon Request

Notes

1. Given our focus on within-person relationships, and considering gender is a between-person variable, we conducted analyses excluding gender. When gender was omitted, the coefficients linking employees’ weekly well-being with their partners’ weekly well-being (both contemporaneous and lagged “effects” one week later) were not statistically significant, despite the coefficients’ sizes being similar. Detailed results are provided as supplementary online material.

2. Given the nature of our four-week data, the autoregressive model of change proposed by Maxwell and Cole (2007) would have been an adequate strategy to study mediation at the between-subjects level. However, this model had identification problems because the sample size was too small (N = 50) for such a complex model (62 free parameters) (see instructions in supplementary online material). According to Maxwell and Cole (2007), multilevel modelling with random intercepts and slopes is also a suitable model for longitudinal relationships at the within-subjects level.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación y Universidades Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities The project PID2019-110093GB-I00 was funding by the MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 3.